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Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), a former wrestling champion known for his combative style, comes to work each day, typically without a jacket, ready to challenge liberals. Despite failing to advance a single bill through Congress during his nine terms, Jordan leveraged his seniority and persistent criticism of Democrats to become the chair of the House Judiciary Committee after Republicans regained control of the chamber in 2023. Beyond his confrontations with Democrats, Jordan has championed what conservatives view as fundamental principles, particularly advocating for states’ rights to manage their affairs without federal interference. When Democrats proposed national voting rights legislation in 2021, Jordan condemned it as “another brazen attempt to seize power from state control and transfer it to partisan bureaucrats in Washington.”
Other prominent Republicans who became committee chairs in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2023 also voiced their commitment to states’ rights. Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, chair of the Administration Committee, joined Jordan in opposing the Democrats’ voting rights bill, instead sponsoring an alternative he claimed would “protect our federalist principles.” Steil argued that his proposal would equip states with the tools to enhance election integrity without dictating specific actions. He emphasized that the U.S. Congress “must restrain itself from acting improperly and unconstitutionally.” Similarly, in a 2021 U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief concerning COVID-19 mandates, Representative James Comer (R-KY), chair of the House Oversight Committee, joined 183 Republican U.S. representatives and senators to assert that state residents should have the autonomy to “craft local solutions to problems facing their States and districts. Federalism concerns should be addressed before requiring federally-imposed solutions.”
However, the chairs’ commitment to states’ rights wavered when Alvin Bragg, district attorney for New York County (elected locally) covering Manhattan, announced his intention to indict former president Donald Trump for falsifying business records to conceal election and tax fraud. The chairs demanded that Bragg justify his prosecutorial decision under state law to the U.S. House: “You are reportedly about to engage in an unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial authority: the indictment of a former President of the United States and a current declared candidate for that office.” Given “the serious consequences of your actions, we expect you to testify about what seems to be a politically motivated prosecutorial decision.”
In response, Bragg defended states’ rights. He argued that House actions “threaten the sovereign powers of the states, the confidentiality of grand jury proceedings, and the integrity of an ongoing criminal prosecution.” Bragg cited a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that stated, “Federal intrusions into state criminal trials frustrate both the states’ sovereign power to prosecute offenders and their efforts to uphold constitutional rights.”
Similarly, when Fani Willis, district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia (Atlanta), indicted Trump and eighteen others under the state’s racketeering law, Jordan demanded that Willis provide documents and communications to justify her prosecutorial decisions. In her nine-page response, Willis rejected this demand: “There is no justification in the Constitution for Congress to interfere with a state criminal matter, as you attempt to do.” She emphasized that “your efforts at intruding upon the State of Georgia’s criminal authority violate constitutional principles of federalism.”
The House committee chairs’ sudden shift on states’ rights highlights the need to examine conservative rhetoric and critically uncover conservatism’s realities. My objective is not to compare conservatism with liberalism, which also has contradictions. I will not generally fact-check conservative claims or assess whether conservative policies are better or worse than liberal ones. My sole objective is to understand conservatism on its own terms by deconstructing conventional myths and revealing the true essence of what the U.S. conservative movement truly represents. To present conservatism authentically, I have allowed conservatives to speak for themselves.
In addition to politicians, I have drawn on conservative activists, operatives, intellectuals, and opinion-makers. Attention to the often inflammatory rhetoric of the past century debunks the myth of a lost golden age of civility in U.S. politics. During the 1930s, for example, conservatives branded President Franklin D. Roosevelt a “socialist,” a “fascist,” a “dictator,” the “first Communist President of the United States,” and the puppet of “fanatical and communistic Jew professors.” Such accusations were not one-sided. Although the study of liberalism is beyond the scope of this book, liberals responded by slamming conservatives as “fascists,” “union-busters,” and sellouts to predatory businesses. George D. Aiken, the moderate Republican governor of Vermont, lamented in 1938, “Sometimes it seems that there never before has been a time in the history of America when there have been so many diverse elements arrayed against each other in bitterness and distrust.”
The late Imre Lakatos, a distinguished epistemologist, offers an analogy from research programs in hard science to understand conservatism as a political program. Every scientific program rests on a hard core of immutable principles, Lakatos says, surrounded by an “outer belt” of auxiliary ideas that can be revised, altered, or even discarded to protect the immutable inner core. A crack in the core could bring down the system with it. In political analysis, the challenge is cutting through the “outer belt” of dispensable ideas to uncover the fixed core of conservative principles. The unpacking of conservatism reveals that two hard core principles guide practice and policy: protecting private enterprise (not free enterprise) and advancing the conservative, though not the only version, of traditional Christian values.
From the publication of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind (1954), through John Keke’s A Case for Conservatism (1998) and Yoram Hazony’s Conservativism: A Rediscovery (2022), with many in between, eminent thinkers have plumbed the philosophical foundations of conservatism. These sages present intriguing, if contradictory, abstractions that cannot explain the meaning of conservativism in the United States as a practical political program. Conservatives cling to the status quo but recognize the need for change. They exalt the rugged individual but decry human imperfections and uphold the value of community. Conservatives are religious but also secular. They reject ideologies but formulate ideologies of their own. Conservatives support ordered authority and enforced morality but cherish individual liberty. They respect tradition but not the inherited traditions of the liberal state. Conservatism is a personal disposition but also a political program. Its ardent followers uphold a strict meritocracy but race, religion, and heritage matter. Conservatives exalt the will of the people but support countermajoritarian restraints.
Even Sherlock Holmes could not deduce the practical political program of conservatives from the abstractions. The elementary truth about conservativism is found by climbing down from the heights of philosophy to probe conservatives’ down-to-earth claims about what their movement represents. Novelist Umberto Eco wrote in The Name of the Rose, “Those things about which we cannot theorize, we must narrate.” Conservative representative Mike Johnson (R-LA), elected Speaker of the House in 2023, narrated a familiar litany of core conservative principles, including “limited government,” “fiscal responsibility,” “free market,” (free enterprise), “the rule of law,” and “human dignity” based on “religion and morality,” which he grounds in his version of traditional Christian values.
The Heritage Foundation, conservative flagship think tank, in its “True North” of “fixed” conservative principles, affirmed Johnson’s formulations, and added:
- Thomas Jefferson said, “The government closest to the people serves the people best.” Powers not delegated to the federal government, nor prohibited by the Constitution, are reserved to the states or to the people.
- Judges should interpret and apply our laws and the Constitution based on their original meaning, not upon judges’ own personal and political predispositions.
- International agreements and international organizations should not infringe on Americans’ constitutional rights, nor should they diminish American sovereignty.
Ronald Reagan, the iconic conservative president, predicated his presidency on the precepts of “free enterprise and personal responsibility,” which Jim DeMint (R-SC), former U.S. senator and Heritage Foundation president, reaffirmed in 2014: “Limited government and individual responsibility” are “fundamental American ideals.”
These self-described conservative principles are summarized unsurprisingly as traditional Christian values, free enterprise, limited government, fiscal responsibility, states’ rights, personal morality and responsibility, law and order, strict construction, and U.S. sovereignty.
(excerpted from chapter 1)
